[jccalhoun]

So what is this data for? Because the ads I get are still nearly completely irrelevant. Last week youtube showed me ads in Spanish which I have zero knowledge of and ads for a company in an entirely different state. If they can't use all this data to know that I don't understand Spanish or what state I live in then what good is all this data?

[hulitu]

It is not used only for ads. It is also sold to other companies and 3 letter agencies.

[lopis]

Like in all analytics, not all data collected is used. In fact, probably 99% of data every collected is never collected. Companies just want to preemptively collect it in case they need it in the future.

[marginalia_nu]

A lot of this seems to be a mechanism to sooth anxieties about whether you are on the right track when taking a risk. Feels good to have a nice graph that points upward. In the past you would have seen an oracle or an astrologer to get reassurance.

People do it as well, they gather tons of statistics on themselves like how many steps they've walked and how many glasses of water they've had and how many hours they've slept, which for the most part is completely non-actionable information and your body is much better at telling you if you are feeling well rested than your spreadsheet is. You get a pretty graph for sure, but it ultimately doesn't say anything you didn't already know.

I guess you could convince yourself this is science, but in science the hypothesis precedes the experiment. If you gather tons of arbitrary data and go digging for correlations, you will find them, but anything interesting you find is most likely going to be spurious relationships and other statistical aberrations.

It's data dredging, not science.

[zibzab]

It could very much be that this data is not used for advertising and is mostly just really horribly implemented dev analytics.

Having read the report, I can't find any smoking guns about _uses_ of the data. But we really don't know at this point.

[jqpabc123]

But we really don't know at this point.

We do know ... or a least we should.

Google has said it receives tens of thousands of "geofence" and "keyword" warrants each year looking to identify anyone within a certain geographic area at a particular time or anyone who searched for a particular keyword.

There are 3 pertinent points here:

1) Google can absolutely identify you personally; otherwise, the warrants would be useless.

2) The authorities are searching info from your phone without probable cause (aka "fishing").

3) Innocent people have been convicted for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

https://techcrunch.com/2021/08/19/google-geofence-warrants/